


take me to church

by jonphaedrus



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Harry Hart Lives, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, lots of in-context triggering, recovery fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 21:36:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3744418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He sees Westminster Abbey. Instead of a burst of civic and national pride, it feels like someone has just punched him in the chest. Harry stumbles, nearly falls over, and he can suddenly see bright Southern sunlight, he can smell the scent of blood all over him, his shoulder aches where someone’s just stabbed him, there are bullet bruises all over his back. There’s someone screaming in the distance and he can see flat, brown eyes facing him down the barrel of a silenced gun.</p><p>He winds up crouched, retching on the floor of a public loo, head between his knees, breathing high and fast through his teeth while Merlin’s voice, quiet and calm and grounding in his ear tells him just stay there, Arthur, someone’s coming, and someone comes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take me to church

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [take me to church 携我去教堂](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4132248) by [imfleur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imfleur/pseuds/imfleur)



> how did this fandom not have something titled "take me to church" like we're missing out on a huge opportunity here

Sometimes, it is that type of movie. It’s that type of movie, because Harry actually lives without much brain damage, just a missing eye and an occasional inability to keep his balance that the doctors think he may eventually learn to correct for as his brain heals.

Valentine wasn’t a very good shot, and they all count their lucky stars, and after two months awake in the mansion infirmary, slowly losing his mind, they let Harry-turned-Arthur go home. Eggsy helps him, because their new Galahad has hardly let Harry out of his sight, sticking to him like a limpet unless he’s had to go home or on a mission, and even then, he’s constantly been worried.

Worried, because he was the one that found Harry in the ICU in Kentucky, pale, bandaged, hooked up to half a dozen machines and in a coma, and he’s been waiting for Harry to wake up like half his body hasn’t really been alive without him.

Harry moves back into his house, taking every step slow, trying to acclimate his body to something as simple as climbing the stairs, and he ignores Eggsy’s proffered hand.

He also ignores that Eggsy refuses to go into his office.

 

 

Harry goes on a walk around London the weekend after he gets home, breathing fresh air and trying not to admit how hard it is for him to keep his balance after about twenty minutes. He pushes on anyway, _hating_ feeling his age. 

And, in the Victoria Tower Gardens, he turns from the Thames and looks the other direction.

He sees Westminster Abbey. Instead of a burst of civic and national pride, it feels like someone has just punched him in the chest. Harry stumbles, nearly falls over, and he can suddenly see bright Southern sunlight, he can smell the scent of blood all over him, his shoulder _aches_ where someone’s just stabbed him, there are bullet bruises all over his back. There’s someone screaming in the distance and he can see flat, brown eyes facing him down the barrel of a silenced gun.

He winds up crouched, retching on the floor of a public loo, head between his knees, breathing high and fast through his teeth while Merlin’s voice, quiet and calm and grounding in his ear tells him _just stay there, Arthur, someone’s coming,_ and someone comes.

Eggsy drags Harry up off of the floor, his other arm wrapped around a tiny child Harry realises must be his baby sister, and then they sit afterward on a park bench, Harry staring at the sky, listening to the rapid beat of his heart and the cooing of the toddler next to him and wondering what’s wrong with him. Wonders if he’s ever going to get better.

 

  

Eggsy doesn’t sleep right, any more. He can hardly find rest, tossing and turning and hearing gunshots in his ears.

Never any gunshots of the times he’s killed people, and after five months as a Kingsman agent, he’s killed a lot of people.

Just one gunshot. One gunshot, and so much blood and static. 

He lays in his bed, hands folded on his collarbone, panting, covered in sweat when he wakes up at three in the morning, swallowing past his dry throat as he tries to make that image leave his head (like he _could_ it’s been burned onto his retinas) and finally mechanically grabs his cellphone.

He calls Harry’s number, because that’s what he did for those first two weeks, when they really did think Harry was dead, and it goes through on the third ring. 

“Eggsy,” says Harry’s voice, on the other side of the line. It’s not rough with sleep. 

“Harry,” Eggsy replies, and his isn’t either.

They lay there, the both of them, Eggsy flat on his back in bed and staring at the ceiling, and Harry curled up on his side, protecting his missing eye by pressing it into the mattress, and neither of them says anything.

They just listen to each other breathe, and fall asleep to the sound, because that’s a constant.

  

 

It takes four months of being nominally “recovered” (which, Harry thinks, is not the right word, because he doesn’t think he’ll ever really be recovered, he’ll just be more-alive and less-dead) before Harry can even look at a gun. The first time he does look at one it happens is when he walks in on Galahad and Lancelot prepping for a mission and he ends up with his back pressed to the wall of his office, wheezing through his teeth and shaking, even as Eggsy sits right outside the door, talking quiet and calm, and Harry just closes his good eye and fights through it.

The next time he sees one, he doesn’t panic, just calmly asks Percival to put the gun away (and how is it that the first eighteen times he got shot in the line of duty it never bothered him, but the nineteenth _does?_ ) and then he starts training in hand-to-hand every day.

It makes his balance better, after he falls flat on his ass half a dozen times, and soon enough Harry is fast and good enough just with a variety of different unarmed combat types that Eggsy can’t even get him in a lock any more.

Harry is the first person to really settle on the fact that he may never hold a gun again.

 

 

“Happy Valentine’s day!” He hears someone say, out in the hallway of HQ, and Harry stares at the paper on his desk. His pen is biting into his fingers, and there’s the rushing sound of blood in his ears, and there’s the tinkle of glass and the shouts of a pastor. He can smell blood and cordite and he hears a woman scream. Wood splinters, and his shoulder _aches_ — 

“Harry?” Says a voice, says _Roxy’s_ voice, and it sounds like she’s said it already several times. There’s blood all over his hands, and his fingers are covered in scratch marks, and Harry looks up at her.

He feels like a wounded animal, hiding from a hunter. 

“Arthur,” she’s switched back to being professional almost immediately, and he doesn’t know why she’s in his office until he looks around and finds everything that he could break in the room has been smashed. There’s a bottle of scotch shattered on the floor along with three glass tumblers, alcohol staining the antique rug. The lamps have all been smashed, the metal bent. His desk chair is in splinters, he even managed to tear pages out of some of his books. His laptop screen is completely shattered, inkwells scattered in pieces all over the floor, and he trembles all over.

“Arthur,” her voice is closer, and suddenly Harry _understands_ why Eggsy must love her so much, because she catches him before he falls, one small, strong hand on his shoulder as she helps him sit down in a clean spot. He’s shaking all over, cold sweat in his hair and on the back of his neck, and she’s grounding him with her hands.

“Eggsy,” he murmurs, and she nods, and leaves him there, gently leaving his office. It’s quiet for a few minutes as he breaks down in silence, hands shaking so violently he can barely get his glasses off, and he staves off crying until Eggsy shows up, slamming into his office.

Eggsy’s shaking just as bad all over, and he nearly falls over at Harry’s side, touches his hands (fear) and then looks in his eyes (worry) and pulls Harry close.

Harry breaks apart in his arms in great, wracking sobs, and Eggsy just holds him.

 

 

His first field mission is nine months after he woke up in the mansion, and it’s easy. No guns—not now, maybe not ever—and all Harry has to do is knock out a couple of thugs, put the fear of god into a small-time gangster trying to go big, and make sure that they have his contacts in the black market to trace his drugs.

Afterward, knuckles stained with blood, Harry stops in an alleyway, and Merlin’s calm brogue tells him to breathe, count the breaths, this is _real_ he is _alive_ these are the names of the men he just knocked out, feel the brick under his fingers, the date, the time, where he is in London. That he’ll be all right, he’ll be all right, he’s going to be all right.

Harry’s almost sick on his shoes.

 

 

They don’t do anything on the year anniversary of him getting shot. Eggsy just invites him over, and Harry sits on the younger man’s couch, playing with Daisy while Michelle keeps her eye on the both of them. They eat dinner, and Harry almost doesn’t drop the fork when he hears a car backfire outside, his breath stopping in his chest for a moment, the sudden burst of adrenalin and fear mitigated by Eggsy’s knee pressing hard up against his.

He nearly falls asleep on the couch, curled up under a blanket and listening to the sounds of the very alive house around him, until he hears footsteps on the stairs and in the living room, far louder than they have to be. Telling him they’re coming. 

“Harry?” Eggsy’s voice is quiet, and Harry rolls over slightly to look at him. He’s wearing only his pants and a threadbare shirt that Harry is _pretty_ sure was his once. “Do you want to come upstairs?”

Harry knows they don’t have a guest bedroom. He hesitates, says nothing for a moment. Eggsy stares at him, and after a long moment, he gets up and follows the younger man. 

For the first time in a year, Harry falls asleep wrapped up in the arms of another human being, and the evening pace of Eggsy’s heart and the regularity of his breathing lulls Harry to sleep three times as fast as he goes on his own.

He tells himself that this is just the both of them recovering from a year before, that this is just more trauma that is washing away with the laundry, but he knows there’s more to it than that.

Eggsy knows too.

 

 

He goes six months without a break, and then someone has the news on in the barracks and the voice of a preacher comes on and Harry feels like someone just hit him in the chest with a train. Kay realises immediately what’s happened as Arthur stumbles hard in a way he hasn’t since he got off his cane permanently four months earlier, and turns off the telly.

It’s too late, though. He can hear a voice in his head screaming hate and anger, and he grabs onto the end of a bed to steady himself. He sees a blonde woman, and he remembers what she looks like with her head blown open, because he’s going to do it. He can smell the cordite as he does it, can see the blood. He can hear the sound of her dropping to the ground, just like he can remember what the preacher looks like with a spar of wood rammed out the back of his skull, and he stumbles out of the room, blindly, doesn’t know where he’s going.

He ends up locked in an empty training room because there’s nothing and no-one to break, hands pressed into his eye and eyesocket, and he shakes through the worst of the heaves, tries to make the screams leave his head. The gunshots—the gun _shot._

On his fifteenth try, Eggsy breaks the door open, the lock cracking under the force of his kicks, and he pushes his way into the room.

Eggsy’s already seen the worst of him. Saw the church just like Harry did, saw the gunshot. He doesn’t even try to tell him to go away, just waits for the younger man to be crouched next to him, one warm hand on Harry’s neck, grounding him, calm voice speaking.

The date. The time. His name. Where he is. Eggsy’s name. The little, simple things.

Harry kisses Eggsy, because he’s _there_ and Eggsy grabs him by the shoulders and holds onto him tight like he’d drown in his arms, and Harry apologises over and over again to a hundred dead men and women, and Eggsy just lets him work through it.

 

 

The first time they make love (and it _is_ making love, however many faces Eggsy makes at the term, however much Harry feels absurd and old calling it that) Eggsy sits boneless in his lap afterward, thumbs tracing over Harry’s cheekbones, until he finally gives in and runs his fingers over the scar on Harry’s empty eyesocket, over his skull, along the red puckered line that mars his face. 

He lets out a shuddering sob, and Harry watches him, hands wrapped around his waist, before Eggsy finally manages,

“I thought you were dead.”

It’s the first time since he woke up that Harry’s seen Eggsy cry, and he breaks apart with great heaving sobs, pressing his face into Harry’s sex-messed hair, holding onto him like if he lets go Harry will just vanish out from his arms, go back to being boneless and broken in a hospital ICU bed, and Harry murmurs the words he’s kept bottled up inside him for over a year:

“As did I.”

The next morning, Eggsy goes into his study for the first time and stands there, staring out the window, his jaw squared off, closes his eyes, and just breathes. 

 

 

At two years, Harry picks up a gun again. He goes down to the firing range, and shoots six magazines empty with his pistol. He misses one in three shots, and he’s breathing heavy by the end of it, but he has control. He doesn’t hear screaming. He can smell the cordite but it’s _real_ cordite. He doesn’t see blood, just the wrecked paper outline of the target.

He feels Eggsy’s hand on his back, on his good side as always to keep him from reacting defensively, and he relaxes slightly, shoulders slumping.

“That was shite,” Eggsy says, and Harry laughs, pressing a hand over his eye, and smiles.

“I suppose I need a refresher.”

Eggsy grins at him.

 

 

There are good days and worse days. Sometimes Harry can’t get out of bed because of head-splitting migraines, sometimes he can’t get anything done at work because his hands are shaking too much, and he ends up just sitting with Merlin and watching his agents work, and work hard. He has nightmares and sweats, but wakes up to Eggsy’s voice with its thick accent and his warm hands rubbing Harry’s chest, reminding him of where he is. 

Merlin’s voice in his ear stops making him feel like he has to glance over his shoulder every other second, and he walks into a church one day and just stands there, hands white-knuckled on the back of a pew, and breathes through his teeth as he listens to the voice of a distant docent. He can accept, now, that those people are dead and he isn’t. 

He leaves, pale and shaky, but within the hour his heartrate is back to normal, and the sweat has dried on the back of his neck, and he gets a coffee at a Starbucks and sees a woman with long blonde hair and a heavy dark skirt walk by, and doesn’t instantly think of pointing a gun at her head. 

He stays home on Valentine’s Day (both of them) and he and Eggsy never say anything on either. Harry learns to tell when something is getting to be too much, and the people around him learn to tell when he’s reaching his limit, and let him be. Eggsy eventually stops holding onto his hand so tight he can feel his bones creak. 

At a certain point, Merlin even stops greeting him in the morning with those touchstones he needed for so long, and instead of saying, _good morning, it’s eight in the morning on Tuesday September the 9th, you’re in your office at Kingsman HQ on Saville Row, your name is Harry Hart, you are fifty-eight, your codename is Arthur,_ he starts just saying, _good morning, Arthur._

 

  

After five years, Harry wakes up one morning to two-tone snoring, one from under his arm (Eggsy) and one from his feet (J.B.) and he closes his eye for a moment, breathing, listening to the calm beat of his heart, smelling nothing but sleeping human and dog, hearing nothing but the ambient noise of early-morning London.

It is the first night he hasn’t dreamt of Kentucky.

It is the last night he ever worries about it.

**Author's Note:**

> check me out on tumblr @professorjonathanphaedrus


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